by Lisa Mason
He takes the Communication Company mimeograph from his jacket pocket and reads:
The riot may last as long as a week. Your problems during this state of war in the streets include not getting killed or stomped, having enough food, getting somewhere else alive if your house burns down, and not getting arrested by the pigs.
This riot may be a rumor, but the riots in Detroit are front-page news.
Chi doesn’t like it. Black hoodies assaulting defenseless little Cyn? Big-time dealers who believe Starbright is part of a burn? And a race riot in the Haight-Ashbury? Violence is contrary to everything hip people like Ruby believe in.
He doesn’t need to calculate those probabilities.
“Let’s not go back to the Scene if those dealers are hanging around the Haight today,” he says. “Okay?”
“Okay!”
Chi takes Starbright’s hand, and they catch the next bus across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.
*
The Sausalito shoreline astonishes Chi. Bridgeway is a tiny overland avenue with ground traffic, not the gondola-filled canal protected by a breakwall on one side, luxury piers and clubs and casinos on the other. Blue–gray water laps low on chaotic chunks of slate. Greenish-red rock crabs crawl along the waterfront as thickly as the tourists. The wind is sweet and salty. The sky, azure. No domes dot the hillside.
He and Starbright sit together on a flat gray boulder at the waterfront and gaze at the city skyline across the Bay.
He searches the hills behind him, sees only a few cottages, pink and blue and yellow. The hillside high above Bridgeway where the domes of his family’s estate will stand one day is a patch of windswept sage. Victorian mansions once stood on these hills at the turn of the twentieth century. Domed estates will stand here centuries later. But in 1967, Sausalito is like a young girl with flowers in her hair.
He catches her studying him. “I’ve never known anyone named Chiron Cat’s Eye in Draco,” she says, sipping her paper cup of Coke. “Is that your street name or do you have a real name?”
He laughs at her sly mockery of the questions he’s always asking her. “That’s my real name.”
“Does it mean something?”
“It does. Chiron is a huge asteroid orbiting between Saturn and Uranus way, way out there. May be a terraforming project some century. The asteroid is named for a centaur, a half-man, half-horse, in ancient Greek myths. Chiron the centaur was a teacher, and his symbol was a key.”
“A key?” She eyes him suspiciously.
He thinks over his sixties slang for a minute. “Not a kilo of grass. Like this.” He takes out his house key to 555 Clayton and scratches a line on the boulder.
“Oh, that kind of key.” She takes out her house key, too, and scratches one of her strange eyes with a star for a pupil. “Hey, let me borrow your maser.”
“Nope.”
“Please?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Bet I can carve with it. Please, please, please?”
“Can’t do it, Starbright. It’s against the Tenets.”
“You and your Tenets. I saw you carve a heart in the sidewalk in front of everybody. Let me carve this rock. Only you and I will see.”
“I can’t let you touch my tool.”
“Your tool,” she teases. “Fine. You hold it, and I’ll guide your hand.”
He cannot believe he’s doing this, but he takes out the maser. She places her hand over his and, after a few experimental doodles, like a dancer leading the couple in a waltz, she draws:
“Wow!” she says when they’re done. “You really can carve with this thing!”
“Put your hand on mine,” he says, not to be outdone. She does. Now he leads. Next to her flower, he draws:
She shrieks with laughter. A fellow on a sailboat anchored offshore looks up from swabbing his deck. Chi pockets the maser.
“You make me crazy, Starbright. That’s a serious Tenet Seven violation.”
“Oh, so what.”
“So what? What if I disappeared and your hair turned green after that little stunt? Hmm?”
“Is reality that easy to change just ‘cause we carved some silly pictures on a rock?”
In her uncanny naïve way, she’s hit upon one of the Big Questions, like a child asking what happens when we die. He has no answer. The LISA techs have no answer. “Sometimes probabilities collapse into the timeline,” he says unhappily. “Sometimes they don’t.”
She nods, obviously skeptical, and tips her cup, swallowing a mouthful of ice cubes. “You’re always asking me questions. What about you, Chi? Who are you, really?”
He shrugs. Damn the Summer of Love Project. He didn’t ask for this.
“See, you don’t want to tell, either,” she teases some more.
For a moment, he shakes with rage. For a moment, he wants to let her have it. Berate her about what her people and the people after her will do to the Earth, do to the future.
No, Chi, he tells himself. Don’t rage at Starbright. Not her.
She crunches her ice cubes, watching him with open curiosity. He cringes. He can practically see her tooth enamel cracking and chipping. She doesn’t have a resiliency tweak, let alone mouth swathe.
“I’m just a student,” he says at last.
“Really?”
“Yep. Just like you. Well, a little ahead of you. I was about to conduct my graduate thesis on liver clones, with a pro-link application, before I got drafted for the SOL Project.”
“The SOL Project?”
“For the Summer of Love.”
He sighs. How distant his Day seems now. Sometimes he wonders if he’ll ever leave the past. As of today, July 27, 1967, the probability of his successful transmission to 2467 is no more than sixty-six percent.
“What does that mean, ‘pro link’? Like golf, or something? You’re Arnold Palmer from Mars?”
He laughs. “Pro-link means I’m professionally jacked for telelink. My experiments with liver clones are conducted in telespace, not on animals.”
“What is telespace, anyway?”
Telespace, he tells her, is a four-dimensional, computer-generated reality, the aggregated correlation of twenty billion minds worldwide. You enter telespace by jacking in your telelink—equipment and programming installed in early childhood.
“Installed?” she says warily.
Oh, hell. He resents that she doesn’t believe him. Here goes, Chi. He sweeps aside the long red hair implants, takes off the synskin patch at the base of his skull, pulls down his jacket and shirt, and—in broad daylight—shows her his neckjack.
“God,” she whispers, staring at the aperture, the cortical wiring rippling up his spine into his neck and diving into his skull. He knows what it looks like—a fine webwork of excellent hardware.
“Go ahead,” he says. “You can touch me.”
She does. “What’s it like?”
“Telespace? It’s prime, the mega thing. A rush of amber burning through your being. You are the amber. You’re real, more real than out-of-link could ever be. You can access huge archetypal memories, if you want to. You can go Macro, and see the whole universe. Or you can go Micro, and see the whole universe.” He laughs, giddy. “And it happens so fast, Starbright. Man, you zoom! You work at speeds and in ways you never thought possible. Jack up, link in, space out!”
She squints at him, crunching her ice. “Sounds like tune in, turn on, drop out. Sounds like LSD.”
He’s taken aback. “That’s ridiculous.”
“No, it really does.” She flips her hair back, surprised at his annoyance. “I’ve tripped, you know.”
“Starbright, I’m talking about telespace!”
“That’s cool.” She stretches her pretty legs over the boulder, lobs a stone into the sea. She gives him a sidelong glance. “So what else are you not telling me? Do you have a girlfriend somewhere in the future?”
A lass, somewhen. The very thought of Bella Venus disturbs him. “I have a girlfriend, yes. Bell
a Venus. For the first star of the evening.”
“The first star of the evening! That’s me, too! My name means the first star of the evening.” She wraps a lock of hair around her finger, bites the split ends, spits them out. “What’s she like?”
“Exquisite,” is the word that leaps to his lips. A tall lass, nearly as tall as him. Reed-slender with graceful bones, her jack on the left side of her swan neck, her skin the color of polished white-gold. They met on a bicycle Path. Both jacked for pro-link, they put their mega minds and prime hardware to a delicious use.
Free-link.
“Bella Venus was the one who discovered we could tinker with our neckjacks and connect directly. Forget access codes and monitors and surveillance. We discovered the private side of link.” He chuckles. “Free-link. It’s illegal.”
Starbright frowns, but Chi’s so caught up in the recollection of free-linking with Bella Venus that he pays her little attention.
“Can you get busted doing that?” she says.
“Oh, yeah. Using unauthorized private telespace outside of the system? That’s first-degree link abuse.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because it’s so exquisite! We could have connected with just about anything, but we went straight to lovemaking. Link to link, Starbright. Mind to mind. Fantasy to fantasy. I know exactly when and where she wants me to touch her, and she loops her pleasure directly into mine. We can overlay illusions or, even better, surrender physical reality to pure simulation. She can become anything for me, and I for her.”
Starbright blushes scarlet. “Why would you want to surrender physical reality to simulation?”
“For the ecstasy!” He smiles at her blush and pats her hand. “Maybe one day you’ll understand.”
“No, I understand right now. I’m not a virgin, you know.”
“I know,” he says. Careful, Chi. Their relationship is fragile enough.
“What color is her hair?” Starbright persists. As if this is really important to her.
“Um. She has no hair.”
“What?”
“She’s bald, like me.”
“You’re not bald!”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
In 2446—the year of his birth, Chi says—fifteen million children died in California alone of the dreadful collection of symptoms known as radiation syndrome. Not just among devolts, exdomers, day laborers, the poor, and the middle classes. Upper-class children attending schools and camps under public domes fell ill, too. And children of the rich who lived under private domes, who had always been protected, who ate vegetables grown in private gardens and fish raised in private ponds and drank filtered water? They fell ill. No one could shield their babies from the aftermath of the Atomic Wars. Certain toxins combined with radiation caused massive cellular breakdown, leading to inevitable excruciating death.
“The technopolistic plutocracy ignored the problem for decades,” Chi says. “Everyone was caught up in the world population crisis. But the plutocracy couldn’t ignore the problem when their children died.”
She nods, somberly crunching her ice.
“Look, we were pushing hard for negative growth,” Chi says. “But, even so, the next generation had to live. I remember how my skipmother monitored everything I ate or drank or touched or was exposed to. And I remember when the rad-vacc was announced. I was five years old. Anyone could get the vaccine, free.”
Chi unbuttons his cuff, rolls up his shirtsleeve. He pulls the leg of his jeans up over the ankle of his Beatle boot. He shows her his arm, his leg. She runs her fingertips over his smooth, hairless skin. He remembers Ruby’s astonished look. Starbright’s face is hard to read.
“This was the side effect, you see,” he says. “Especially in children under ten. The dose had to be stronger, more intensive at skin-level. Well, we all went bald, top to bottom.”
“I’m sorry,” Starbright whispers.
He pulls down his jeans leg, rolls down his shirt cuff. “Don’t be. It was a miracle. The rad-vacc saved billions of lives. And freed us from the domes.”
“Then what’s this?” She touches his long, red hair.
“Implants. Oh, we could get implants. Just like you and your friends in the Haight-Ashbury could get haircuts. We choose not to, just like you choose not to cut your hair. Me and my friends, we’re the cool tools who go nude. Dig it, Starbright, bald is beautiful.”
She stares at him, openmouthed, disbelieving.
“Bald is mega,” he declares. “When we think something is cool? We say, ‘It’s nude.’ There’s nothing like pure skin to make you pay attention to every muscle, every curve, every pore.”
“Then you… .walk around naked?”
“No, no. We like hats and scarves and jewelry. Head-painting was prime just before I left. Bella Venus paints her entire skull, works the designs down her forehead, all around her eyes and cheeks, to her neck. You should see her chrysanthemum design. It’s amazing.”
He’s struck another nerve, unwittingly. Starbright frowns again.
“Would Bella Venus like my drawings?” she says shyly.
“Sure she would.”
“Do you?”
He hesitates. “Your drawings are very good, Starbright. But, sometimes, well, they’re a bit disproportional.”
“That’s just what my mother says!”
He grits his teeth. Not the right answer. “Your drawings are full of imagination. That’s the most important thing. As for the rest, you can learn techniques. And human anatomy. You could go to art school.”
“You like bald women,” she whispers. Then, “You don’t mind my hair?”
“I’m getting used to it.”
Not the right answer, at all. She snuffles, wiping her nose under the guise of pushing back a stray curl.
“What I mean is,” he says, struggling to find the right words. “What I mean is, your hair is fine, Starbright.”
Still not the right answer. She turns her back to him.
Women! Do they ever change? I want you to want me, but I’m not sure if I want you. He longs to tell her not to worry about him. She has her whole life ahead of her. A life without him.
What will her life be like? He has some idea.
Last night he searched through the contraband holoids, testing for access over and over, while he raged at his skipmother and wondered why she decided to torture him like this. He tested the crystal slivers until after midnight when the tiny red message he’d been searching for popped up in the lavender field:
“07-27-1967. You may insert Disc 4 now.”
He reaches over and strokes Starbright’s hair, recalling what he witnessed.
You have lovely hair, Starbright. But if you truly are the Axis and you survive the Summer of Love, one day you’ll trim your long, soft curls. Over many, many days you’ll change in ways you cannot know now, but your gentle heart and your tears will stay with you. After the child you’re carrying now is born, you will win the National Merit Scholarship Award and, at long last, the Archives will contain another, older image of you. You will discover an affinity for science. After your years at university and medical school, you will still draw romantic pictures of goddesses. After a first marriage and a difficult divorce, a challenging second marriage and another daughter and a son, you will cry at the sight of someone suffering or a kitten playing with a string. If you’re the Axis, they’ll think you’re eccentric when you lobby against the use of animals in medical experiments. You will not return to San Francisco except to visit your first daughter, who will attend a university there. After twenty years of watching people suffer and die, you will cry at age fifty-five when your life’s work, the DNA mutation experiment, fails. Seven years later, when your first daughter wins the Nobel Prize for a cancer cure, and she thanks you, up there on the podium in front of all those people, for the inspiration you always gave her, you will cry to a standing ovation.
If you’re the Axis, Starbright. If you’re truly the Axis.
Gulls wheel and cry in the sky above.
That’s what Chi longs to tell her. You have lovely hair and a pretty young body and a fine intelligence. And beautiful big brown eyes. But never lose your gentle heart, Starbright. That’s your most precious gift.
But he can’t say any of this. If Starbright is just another longhaired girl who ran away to the Haight-Ashbury for the Summer of Love, the life of Axis will mean nothing to her.
He strokes her hair. He’s never felt such a profound ache in his heart. And then, in a flash, he realizes that if Starbright is the Axis, he doesn’t need to tell her anything. She will fulfill her destiny as surely as the sun rises.
She will fulfill her destiny, that is, if she and the daughter she carries survive this Hot Dim Spot.
He is struck with overwhelming tenderness for this lush, pouting girl with tears in her eyes. This girl who will play such an important role in history one day. He takes her hand, kisses her fingertips. She looks up, startled. Another tear spills. He kisses that, too, and wraps his arms around her. He catches his breath for a moment, then slowly takes in the furry scent of her hair, the sweet saltiness of her body. He relaxes and allows the scent of her, the feel of her to drift into him.
She is as elusive as the gulls wheeling above, as dreams or whispered words or the half-remembered memories of childhood.
12
A Whiter Shade of Pale
Ruby is ready for the riot before nightfall. She packs most of the Mystic Eye’s inventory in three dozen cardboard boxes. She and Morgana lug the boxes out back and stack them in the garage. Ruby wrenches the doors shut and padlocks them. Come eight-thirty, as clouds blow in from the ocean and dusk spreads out from the east, the two women sit on the stoop, sipping apple juice and fanning themselves, soaked in sweat and paranoia.
“‘To smash something is the ghetto’s chronic need.’ James Baldwin wrote that in Notes of a Native Son. He was talking about the Harlem riot in August ’43,” Ruby says. “I was greener than a flower child then.”